I want to give you an update as to how we're spending our funds. We've purchased a week's run in Michigan, airing in Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Paw Paw, Richland & Lansing. These are swing or 'purple' areas which give us the best coverage for our funds, reaching over 1 million voters.
I want to send a special thank you to this community. As I've noted before, I read every email, although I cannot respond to them all. I also read the entire threads of these diaries & when I posted our Ohio buy report diary Pakalolo noted that Dayton was having power outages due to Hurricane Ike. I was not aware of this, so I contacted the agency we've used for the buy. They in turn contacted the stations who denied this was the case. Well, I've been in contact with someone from DKos via email (not sure if it's the same person) who lives in Dayton & they confirmed the power was indeed down. I was asked to provide proof, and she forwarded me news reports detailing how widespread, how long & what areas were hit with power outages. They didn't budge easily & it was still a fight over the last 2 days, but with that evidence we have been granted 4 days of "make goods" and thus will be on the air in Dayton through Thursday instead of Monday. This saved us a great deal of money down the drain, thanks to this community!
Our next step is to move west. We're going to put the ad on the air in Colorado next. Clearly we have a path to victory through Colorado and New Mexico, when combined with Iowa should we not pull Ohio. We will take on New Mexico after that & continue monitoring the polls and our microtargeting data to most efficiently use the funds we raise.
Again, here are the ads we are airing, 'Judgment':
And 'Community':
We're nearly finished with a couple of additional ads, but in the mean time I have been receiving many good ideas via email, as well as posted on diary threads. I've also seen a handful of diaries written in an effort to combine thoughts on what ads you'd like to see. David Stern of MixedInk contacted me to offer a collaborative tool where people with ideas for potential spots could work them out in that space, as a sort of Wiki/Diary hybrid. Comments & ideas are up & down rated & over the course of a week a finished product or 'best idea' can be created, which we will produce and air so this becomes even more of a shared effort. Here's the link for this tool so you can share your thoughts & ideas of what spot you want to see on the air!
So we're up in Ohio and Michigan, Colorado is next. If you can help us with the Colorado drive we have two ways now to make things easier, you can contribute directly at our website which also has our address for sending checks or through our ActBlue account. The ActBlue page also provides an easy way to share our efforts with friends by sending a personalized email.
Please keep in mind, there are many opinions on which as is best, etc. but we allow you to choose which ads your money goes to support or to split it up evenly, so if you love one & not the other, when you fill out our form you can know that what you contribute is going to the spot or spots you feel are best to help us win this election.
Another note, sometimes there's a sense of what does my contribution really do? We are buying time in bulk, blocks of a week at a time & our average cost per spot is just over $40, so when you contribute $50 you know you've paid a little more than one full airing of our spot, or $25 is nearly an airing of a spot. A little goes a long way, and that's what is making this possible.
Also, if you're on Facebook check out our Facebook Group.
Thank you for all that you do.